It’s a wonder that President Donald Trump devotes so much time to discrediting the press, when the press does so much to discredit itself.

The media’s errors over the past week haven’t been marginal or coincidental, but involved blockbuster reports on one of the most dominating stories of the past year, Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. They all slanted one way — namely, toward lurid conclusions about the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with the Russians.

Every media outlet makes mistakes. It’s easier than ever to run with fragmentary or dubious information in a frenzied news cycle that never stops. But underlying the media blunders was an assumption — not based on any evidence we’ve yet seen — of Trump guilt in the Russia matter. This was news, in other words, too anti-Trump to check.

On the day it broke that Michael Flynn had pled guilty to lying to the FBI, Brian Ross of ABC News had a seemingly epic scoop. He reported that Flynn would testify that Donald Trump directed him to make contacts with Russian officials prior to the election. This was the collusion equivalent of a four-alarm fire. A New York Times columnist tweeted, “President Mike Pence, here we come.” The stock market dropped several hundred points.

Then Ross “clarified” the story to say that Trump instructed Flynn to reach out to the Russians after the election. This wasn’t a minor detail of chronology; it ripped the heart out of the story. Ross’s blockbuster went from a suggestion of collusion to a suggestion of the normal course of business during a presidential transition. ABC suspended Ross for a month.

CNN followed this up with its own botched report on how Don Trump Jr. allegedly got a heads-up email prior to the release of a batch of WikiLeaks emails during the campaign. The item rocketed around the Internet — accompanied by explosive imagery — and was repeated by other major news organizations. The only problem is CNN flubbed the date. The email came after the release of the documents, not before. Once again, supposed evidence of collusion evaporated upon contact with better-informed, follow-up reporting. CNN corrected its dispatch, and one of its correspondents called the episode “a black eye.”

Around the same time, Bloomberg reported that Robert Mueller had subpoenaed Trump records from Deutsche Bank, before clarifying to say that Mueller had subpoenaed people related to Trump, perhaps Paul Manafort. A Mueller move that would have crossed a Trump “red line” against investigation of his finances — risking a constitutional showdown — had become something more ambiguous.

If the press had less faith that Robert Mueller is on the verge of bringing the Trump presidency to its knees, it might exercise a little more discrimination. When your only frame of reference for the Mueller investigation is Watergate, everything looks like a proverbial smoking gun. When for professional reasons (the story of the century) and perhaps partisan ones (a hated Republican kicked out of the office) you’re rooting for the worst, you let your guard down.

Special prosecutors, investigators, and counsels are usually a bad idea. They are admissions that constitutionally mandated institutions don’t work — and can be rescued only by supposed superhuman moralists, who are without the innate biases inherent in human nature.

The record from Lawrence Walsh to Ken Starr to Patrick Fitzgerald suggests otherwise. Originally narrow mandates inevitably expand — on the cynical theory that everyone has something embarrassing to hide. Promised “short” timelines and limited budgets are quickly forgotten. Prosecutors search for ever new crimes to justify the expense and public expectations of the special-counsel appointment.

Soon the investigators need to be investigated for their own conflicts of interest, as if we need special-special or really, really special prosecutors. Special investigations often quickly turn Soviet, in the sense of “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has led what seems to be an exemplary life of public service. No doubt he believes that as a disinterested investigator he can get to the bottom of the once contentious charge of “Russian collusion” in the 2016 election. But can he?

A Mandate Gone Wild
Something has gone terribly wrong with the Mueller investigation.

The investigation is venturing well beyond the original mandate of rooting out evidence of Russian collusion. Indeed, the word “collusion” is now rarely invoked at all. It has given way to its successor, “obstruction.” The latter likely will soon beget yet another catchphrase to justify the next iteration of the investigations.

There seems far less special investigatory concern with the far more likely Russian collusion in the matters of the origins and dissemination of the Fusion GPS/Steele dossier, and its possible role in the Obama-administration gambit of improper or illegal surveilling, unmasking, and leaking of the names of American citizens.

Leaks from the Mueller investigation so far abound. They have seemed calibrated to create a public consensus that particular individuals are currently under investigation, likely to be indicted — or indeed likely guilty.

These public worries are not groundless. They are deeply rooted in the nature and liberal composition of the Mueller investigative team — whose left-leaning appointments just months ago had understandably made the liberal media giddy with anticipation from the outset. Wired, for instance, published this headline on June 14: “Robert Mueller Chooses His Investigatory Dream Team.” Vox, on August 22, wrote: “Meet the all-star legal team who may take down Trump.” The Daily Beast, two day later, chimed in: “Inside Robert Mueller’s Army.”

Following President Trump’s historic declaration recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, West Bank and Gazan Arabs took to the streets in rage. They burned U.S. and Israeli flags. They cursed America, Israel and the Yahuds (Jews). Their imams cited verses from the Koran and the Hadiths about the usurpers and interlopers and the “descendants of apes and pigs.” In other words, it was business as usual for the Palestinians. Nothing had changed.

At the State Department too, it was business as usual. In a transparent effort to placate the Arab bloc, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the process of moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would take several years. Tillerson is said to have counseled Trump against recognition.

Then, at a Washington DC press briefing on December 7, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Satterfield was evasive when asked by AP journalist Matt Lee, “what country is Jerusalem in.” Satterfield acknowledged that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel but paradoxically could not say definitively that Jerusalem was located in Israel. Satterfield went on to note that consistent with current State Department policy, U.S. citizens born in Jerusalem would not be able to state their place of birth as “Israel” on their passports. The only options currently available to U.S citizens born in Jerusalem are to note either “Jerusalem” as their place of birth or if born prior to 1948, “Palestine.”

This then is the absurdity that the White House must contend with. It appears that the State Department, staffed with a cadre of career civil servants and employees of the diplomatic corps, is conducting its own foreign policy, one that deviates from the goals of the White House and undermines its objectives. This group is perhaps more fanatical in its opposition to the president’s historic declaration than some Arab leaders.

Their resistance is motivated by a myriad of reasons. Some simply hate Trump and this offers an opportunity to engage in obstructionism. Some are deeply anti-Semitic and their sympathies lie squarely in the Arab camp. Others view change and bold action as a threat and prefer the status quo. Whatever their motivations, they are working in concert to delay and obstruct the president’s bold new policy initiatives aimed at supporting a loyal ally and acknowledging reality while at the same time breaking the deadlock and reviving an anemic peace process based on a foundation of truth.

President Trump last Wednesday announced that the United States formally recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and that work will start on physically moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The uproar over this announcement epitomizes the futility and duplicity that for seven decades has fed the lies lying at the heart of the conflict between Israel and Arabs. But Trump’s announcement should be just the beginning of a radical paradigm shift in how this country deals with the region.

One change is to abandon the appeasing gestures and empty diplomatic formulae that typify our feckless diplomacy. What Trump proposed is not a substantive change, but an acknowledgment of reality. Jerusalem already is Israel’s capital: its parliament, the Knesset, is already there, as are its supreme court, numerous government agencies, and the residence of its president. Visiting dignitaries meet their Israeli counter parts in Jerusalem. In every respect, Jerusalem functions as a national capital, except one: foreign embassies are in Tel Aviv.

Keeping embassies in Tel Aviv, then, is an endorsement of the Arab lie that Jerusalem is a particularly sacred Islamic city, and so should be the capital of future Palestinian state. But going along with this canard merely validates propaganda and a revisionist history the purpose of which is to alienate Jews from their traditional homeland in order to achieve the ultimate aim: destroying Israel as a state. The truth is, Jerusalem has been a Jewish city for three thousand years, as documented in historical records and archaeological finds. Even a 1925 Muslim guide-book to Jerusalem said that the Temple Mount’s status as the site of the First Temple and the altar of King David “is beyond dispute.” Conquest, ethnic cleansing, and foreign occupation have not broken that claim, and for most of history Jews have been the majority of occupants––in 1948, more than twice as many Jews lived in Jerusalem than Arabs, and today 120,000 more Jews than Arabs live there.

Nor is the claim that Jerusalem is one of Islam’s holiest site accurate. That notion is a later one, based on a few vague Koranic verses, and it became significant only after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War as a propaganda tool for demonizing Israel and soliciting international support. Before 1967, Jerusalem was a provincial backwater for the Arabs, and the Palestinian’s founding charter, the 1964 Palestinian National Covenant, does not mention Jerusalem at all. But even if Jerusalem does have a special significance for Islam, that happened only by dint of conquest, invasion, and occupation. And yes, Israel recovered their holiest site by conquest during a defensive war. If we want, however, to assign title by adjudicating competing historical claims based on continuing cultural and religious connections, Muslims lose the debate. We need to stop taking seriously the demand that Jerusalem be the capital of some imagined Palestinian state that Palestinian Arabs by their violent deeds, and their serial rejection of four offers of a state, have done nothing constructive to create.

The claim to Jerusalem––like the “right to return” of the ever-metastasizing “Palestinian refugees,” and the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from lands their ancestors had inhabited nearly two thousand years before Islam existed––is a demand meant to forestall any final agreement that doesn’t further the Palestinian Arabs’ eliminationist aims. For states in the West, on the other hand, the claim facilitates doing nothing meaningful to resolve the dispute, and masks with duplicitous diplomacy their scapegoating and often outright anti-Semitic hostility to Israel.

Around 7:20 Monday morning what police called “an improvised, low-tech” pipe-bomb style device detonated prematurely while strapped to the body of jihadist immigrant and Brooklyn resident Akayed Ullah, 27, in a subway passageway between Times Square and the Port Authority, a massive bus terminal, in Manhattan. Another unexploded device was found on his person. As a result of the wardrobe malfunction, the bungling would-be bomber suffered serious burns and innocent lives were saved. Three or possibly four bystanders were injured but their wounds were not deemed life-threatening.

In 2011 Ullah lawfully moved to the United States from Bangladesh with an F-43 family immigrant visa, according to the White House. About 70 percent of new immigration to the U.S. is chain migration.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders held up the attacker as a beneficiary of the chain migration system President Trump wants to get rid of. The Trump administration would reverse the systemic discrimination against well-rounded would-be immigrants who speak English. Trump wants the immigration system to emphasize merit and employability, as opposed to familial relationships.

After “diversity visa lottery” winner Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, who came to the U.S. from Uzbekistan seven years ago, killed eight people in a Manhattan park on Halloween, the Trump administration also unveiled plans to terminate games of chance as a method for selecting future Americans.

The world’s most potent bad actors—because they are widely admired and treated as moral arbiters—are the NGOs that fly under a false flag, claiming to be champions of human rights.

Human rights NGOs bear a major responsibility for the demonizing of Israel in the West. In Catch the Jew Tuvia Tenenbom, masquerading as Tobi the German, focuses on the hundreds of so-called human rights NGOs, heavily funded by European governments (including that of Germany), that infest Israel and the Palestinian-controlled territories and are hunting for Israeli misdeeds—and fabricating them (sometimes staging them) as they come up short. Robert Bernstein, the publisher who founded Human Rights Watch and served as its chairman for 20 years, publicly disassociated himself from the organization in a 2009 op-ed in the New York Times. Although Bernstein’s focus is on Human Rights Watch, no one has put the problem with these outfits better than he:

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them—through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform. That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic world.…Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies. Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records…The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepared report after report on Israel.

Since then the assaults on Israel have only grown more blatant, with Human Rights Watch accusing Israel of war crimes. Recently its executive director Kenneth Roth tweeted a link to an article by Nadia Ellia, a Palestinian activist in the BDS movement, which declared that “white supremacy and Zionism are two of a kind.” Israeli Foreign Affairs spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon has called Human Rights Watch a “blatantly hostile anti-Israeli organization whose reports have the sole purpose of harming Israel with no consideration whatsoever for the truth or reality.” Human Rights Watch’s most recent initiative (with financial support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) is to encourage punitive measures against banks that provide services to Israelis living in communities beyond the Green Line (the armistice lines of 1949).

Amnesty International, the other big fish in the human rights pond, assails Israel year after year, waxing especially indignant when Israel finally had enough of incessant rocket attacks and took on Hamas. Its one-sided reports ignore the years of unprovoked attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas, the use by Hamas of human shields and Israeli efforts to spare civilian casualties to blithely accuse Israel for breaching the laws of war “by carrying out direct attacks on civilians.” Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor in an interview with Voice of Israel radio said of Amnesty: “Almost all of the reports are hearsay from Palestinian sources. All of this is a game. There is no ethical basis to their research.” Not to be outdone by Human Rights Watch’s most recent initiative on banks, Amnesty has now declared “we’ll consider whether the situation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories meets the international definition of apartheid” a process that “will require thorough research and a rigorous legal review of the evidence.” Given what passes for research at Amnesty and the ability to use as “evidence” the wildly distorted reports that pour from UN agencies, it’s not difficult to predict Amnesty’s conclusion. And given that “practices of apartheid” are listed as grave breaches of international humanitarian law, Amnesty will feel free to demand the most punitive international measures against Israel.

Critics of one or another policy position of human rights NGOs almost invariably stipulate that their “intentions are good.” No, they are not. Their attempts to destroy the legitimacy of the Jewish state (and ultimately the state itself) bear witness to the fact that most are malign actors.

But Israel is a small country and in the last few years the human rights NGOs, while by no means neglecting Israel, have embraced a much larger target—the European Union. In this case they are not flirting with genocide, but are using human rights—in this case the rights of refugees, as they define them—to deny Europeans the right to borders. The same romanticism of third world peoples and hostility toward the supposedly forever-guilty colonialist West that partly informs the animus against Israel pervades the effort to throw open the borders of Europe to all who would come there, whether in flight from civil unrest or in search of economic opportunity. Human rights NGOs not only seize the moral high ground to shame Europe’s political elites into accepting huge numbers of migrants who come uninvited to their shores, but box in EU member countries through legal challenges and by deploying their own ships at sea.

The extent to which human rights NGOs have mobilized to physically transfer migrants to Europe’s shores is not widely appreciated. In 2014, according to the Italian coastguard, rescue boats operated by NGOs brought in less than one percent of all migrants. Thus far, in 2017, the Italian coastguard reports NGOs have picked up more than a third of all migrants. (Frontex, the EU border protection agency, provides an even larger estimate of 40%.) The NGOs are aided by a legal ruling in 2012 by the European Commission on Human Rights (ECHR) in Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy, known familiarly as the Hirsi ruling (in which Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and two other NGOs were given the right to participate as “third parties” and were liberally quoted in the ruling). The suit was on behalf of 24 migrants from Somalia and Eritrea, part of a group of 200 who had been rescued from drowning at sea by ships of the Italian Revenue Police which transferred them to an Italian military ship.

The lawsuit challenged the Italian policy that had sent the migrants back to their point of departure in Libya with the cooperation of the Libyan government (then headed by Moammar Gaddafi). The 17-man ECHR court ruled unanimously that once on an Italian ship migrants were on Italian soil and each individual had the right to “independent and rigorous scrutiny” of his asylum claims plus a right to appeal the initial decision. The court awarded 15,000 euros (plus legal costs) to each of the migrants, a princely sum in their countries of origin. Not surprisingly Amnesty hailed the ruling as “historic.” As Belgian author Drieu Godefridi has pointed out, in Africa everyone understood that if they could reach the Mediterranean Europe’s navies would be obliged to ferry them directly to Europe. The objective was no longer to reach Europe but to be intercepted.

Traffickers no longer bothered to fill the tanks on the unseaworthy boats and rafts they crammed with humanity—they just had to make it beyond territorial waters. In the last four years, more than 600,000 migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria is the largest single source), have reached Italy. In the first six months of 2017 85,000 arrived, 9% above the number in 2016, with 10,000 in the last week of June alone. In July an increasingly desperate Italy –as the rest of Europe blocked the path of the migrants northward– pushed back, demanding the human rights NGOs operating in the Mediterranean (among them Doctors without Borders, Jugend Rettet, Save the Children, SOS Mediterraneee and Sea Watch) agree to a code of conduct. The code is designed to stop the NGOs from in effect partnering with human smuggling rings.

Thus, to take a few items, the code prohibits the NGOs’ ships from turning off their tracking devices (with the devices turned off they can go undetected into Libyan territorial waters), bans light-signal communications used to signal traffickers a good moment to launch their boats, requires NGO boats that pick up refugees to take them to ports in Italy (not unload them onto larger ships and immediately engage in further close-to-Libya “rescues”), and requires NGOs to allow Italian police on board their vessels (ostensibly to check for the presence of smugglers aboard the refugee boats but whose effect would also be to impede violations of the code). Predictably Amnesty and Human Rights Watch mounted their virtuous high horse, declaring that “attempts to restrict NGO search and rescue operations risk endangering thousands of lives.” Four of the eight NGOs active in the Mediterranean refused to sign on to the code. But Italy showed it meant business by impounding the ship Iuventa, operated by one of the refusers, the German Jugend Rettet (Rescue the Youth), on the grounds, according to public prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio, that “there were contacts, meetings, understandings” between the boat and the traffickers, and migrants were “handed over” to the Iuventa by smugglers rather than being “rescued.”

The number of migrants trafficked out of Libya has fallen dramatically, presumably in good part because of Italy’s action. Indeed the Italian coast guard threatened to attack boats operated by NGOs, prompting several to suspend their operations. But few believe this is anything but a temporary respite, given the huge profits made by traffickers and the enormous demand for their services. Gatestone Institute Fellow Soeren Kern reports that according to a (leaked) classified German government report more than six million migrants are waiting in countries around the Mediterranean to cross into Europe. The report says one million are waiting in Libya, another million in Egypt, 720,000 in Jordan, 430,000 in Algeria, 160,000 in Tunisia and 50,000 in Morocco. More than three million waiting in Turkey are currently prevented from crossing over to Europe by Erdogan in accordance with the deal he struck with the EU. An African Union-European Union summit that brought 55 African and 28 European leaders to the Ivory Coast on Nov. 29-30 to come up with longer-term measures to stem the refugee flow came up empty, the only concrete decision to evacuate 3,800 migrants stranded in Libya.

There have been thoughtful proposals to control the refugee flow, as for example in Douglas Murray’s The Strange Suicide of Europe. But little will be achieved unless Europe’s decision makers and opinion shapers wake up from their delusion that human rights NGOs offer the moral touchstone by which to evaluate their actions. (At present European countries in fact provide a substantial portion of their funds.) The first essential step is for European leaders to recognize that far from holy humanitarians, these NGOs are destructive ideologues who would deprive the citizens of European countries of their rights to all that is most important to them–their legal and political systems, their cultures and traditions. In the perspective of the human rights NGOs, citizens have no better claim to their country than foreigners who demand to enter, whether genuine refugees (although major NGOs have shown little concern for Yazidis and Christians, truly in need of refuge) or people fleeing conflict zones or escaping poverty. Add them all up and virtually all the peoples of Africa and the Middle East have claims to a life in Europe. There are layers of irony here. The NGOs draw upon Europe’s feelings of guilt for its colonial past and above all for the Holocaust. Indeed the laws and rulings invoked by the various EU courts on behalf of the refugees are for the most part based on rulings made to assure that Europe would not again close its doors to those fleeing for their lives, as it closed them to the Jews. Germany, as the perpetrator of mass murder, obviously bears the chief guilt and as a result Angela Merkel has been in the forefront in welcoming the newcomers—“we can do this.” Yet it is precisely the huge wave of Moslems, the vast majority of migrants, with their entrenched anti-Semitism, that will ensure that Jews are forced to flee a hostile Europe.

The human rights NGOs fail to recognize that citizens have responsibilities as well as rights, responsibilities that it is especially incumbent upon their political leaders to understand and fulfill. Journalist Peter Hutchens put it very well in 2015. He was writing about England but what he says applies equally to the rest of Europe:

Actually we can’t do what we like [with Britain]. We inherited it from our parents and grandparents and we have a duty to hand it on to our children and grandchildren, preferably improved and certainly undamaged. It is one of the heaviest responsibilities we will ever have. We cannot just give it away to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves.

Rael Jean Isaac is author of several books, including The Coercive Utopians, Madness in the Streets and Roosters of the Apocalypse.

The media has discredited President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – falsely claiming the president has reversed nearly seven decades of American foreign policy. Trump’s decision has pitted America squarely against the United Nations.

America’s policy on Jerusalem is actually laid out in “The Jerusalem Embassy Act 1995 (Act)” passed by the Senate (93–5) and the House (374–37) on 24 October 1995 – specifically highlighted by Trump when announcing his decision:

“In 1995, Congress adopted the Jerusalem Embassy Act, urging the federal government to relocate the American embassy to Jerusalem and to recognize that that city — and so importantly — is Israel’s capital. This act passed Congress by an overwhelming bipartisan majority and was reaffirmed by a unanimous vote of the Senate only six months ago.”

The Act unequivocally states:

“SEC. 3. TIMETABLE.

(a) Statement of the Policy of the United States.

(1) Jerusalem should remain an undivided city in which the rights of every ethnic and religious group are protected. (2) Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel; and (3) the United States Embassy in Israel should be established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999.”

The Act’s preamble details the following facts critical to Congress’s overwhelming vote:

1. Each sovereign nation, under international law and custom, may designate its own capital.

2. Since 1950, the city of Jerusalem has been the capital of the State of Israel.

3. The city of Jerusalem is the seat of Israel´s President, Parliament, and Supreme Court, and the site of numerous government ministries and social and cultural institutions.

4. The city of Jerusalem is the spiritual center of Judaism, and is also considered a holy city by the members of other religious faiths.

5. From 1948-1967, Jerusalem was a divided city and Israeli citizens of all faiths as well as Jewish citizens of all states were denied access to holy sites in the area controlled by Jordan.

6. In 1967, the city of Jerusalem was reunited during the conflict known as the Six Day War.

7. Since 1967, Jerusalem has been a united city administered by Israel, and persons of all religious faiths have been guaranteed full access to holy sites within the city.

8. The United States maintains its embassy in the functioning capital of every country except in the case of our democratic friend and strategic ally, the State of Israel.

9. In 1996, the State of Israel will celebrate the 3,000th anniversary of the Jewish presence in Jerusalem since King David´s entry.

The morally-bankrupt United Nations has ignored these facts for the last 22 years – choosing instead to pass countless resolutions supporting spurious Arab claims to East Jerusalem that could have been satisfied at any time between 1948 and 1967 following six Arab armies illegally invading Western Palestine and ethnically cleansing East Jerusalem’s entire Jewish population, destroying synagogues and desecrating Jewish cemeteries.

United Nations member States who vote – or abstain from voting – on future resolutions supporting specious artificially-contrived Arab claims in East Jerusalem risk being collectively shamed and internationally castigated.

Every German knows that hardly any asylum seekers whose applications are rejected are forced to leave Germany. But if their application is rejected and they do decide to return to their home country, they are rewarded with an allowance of between €1000 ($1,200) and €3000 ($3,600).

This information campaign, however, must have been carefully hidden from the German public — no major newspaper reported it at the time.

“The only authentic and honest thing about this movie were the closing credits….” — Henryk Broder, columnist, Die Welt.

The German foreign ministry has launched a website to discourage would-be migrants from making their journey to Germany: “Rumours about Germany: Facts for Migrants”. It aims — In English, French and Arabic — to debunk “some of the most common false promises made by traffickers”, such as:

“Every refugee receives a welcome payment of 2,000 euros”,
“Germany grants a house to every refugee” or,
“The ship for the crossing is very big, it even has a pool and a cinema.”

The new website comes in the wake of “AWARE MIGRANTS”, a similar project jointly developed by the Italian Ministry of the Interior and the International Office for Migration(IOM) in July 2016. Whereas the goal of “AWARE MIGRANTS” was to raise awareness about the dangerous journey across the African desert and the Mediterranean, “Rumours about Germany” focuses mostly on the economic aspects of asylum seekers’ lives in Germany — which the website paints as one of hardships and dismal prospects:

“Those entering Germany illegally will not be able to get a job. Also note that the German government does not provide refugees with jobs. … Contrary to rumours and misinformation deliberately spread by human traffickers, Germany does not provide a welcome payment. Nobody will be given his own house. In fact, finding a place to live has become more and more difficult in Germany, especially in the big cities. Also note that you cannot choose freely where to live while you seek asylum and may have to stay in remote places where no one understands your language.”

“With the website www.rumoursaboutgermany.info,” the foreign ministry explained in a press release, “the foreign ministry continues an information campaign of the same name which it started abroad in the fall 2015”.

This information campaign, however, must have been carefully hidden from the German public – no major newspaper reported it at the time. To find information about it, one has to go to the foreign ministry’s website and find a press release from January 2016 in which the ministry describes its anti-migration campaign in Afghanistan:

“During the first phase at the end of 2015, large billboards were placed in in Kabul, Masar-e Scharif and Herat on locations with a particularly high volume of traffic. They contain questions in the local languages Dari and Pashtu: ‘Leaving Afghanistan? Are you sure?’ and ‘Leaving Afghanistan? Have you thought this through?'”

Obviously, the billboard advertisement did not have the effect the German government was looking for — probably why it had to launch the new website. The foreign ministry’s press release quotes Andreas Kindl, the ministry’s “Agent for Strategic Communication”, as saying:

“The website is optimized for smartphones and speaks in simple, clear language to people who are thinking about coming to Germany, who are on their way or who already are here.”

Kindl, a graduate in Islamic Studies was, until September 2017, Germany’s ambassador to Yemen. The German government might think that the job requires a certain kind of cultural expertise, but there is a problem: even if a would-be migrant happens to go to the “Rumours about Germany” website — which seems unlikely — why would he be convinced by claims such as this:

“Many asylum seekers do not qualify for protection and their applications are rejected — they are not allowed to stay and have to leave Germany. Then they return [home] with no money and have to start from scratch.”

Every German knows that hardly any asylum seekers whose applications are rejected are forced to leave Germany. If their application is rejected and they decide to return to their home country, they are rewarded with an with an allowance of between €1000 ($1,200) and €3000 ($3,600). Thus, contrary to what “Rumours about Germany” claims, making the journey to Germany still appears as a win-win proposition.

To the German reader, the whole campaign and its central messages must seem disturbing. Since 2015, when Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to more than a million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, the German public has been kept under the impression that every single migrant entering Germany was a refugee who had fled a war zone such as Syria or Iraq. To keep up this fiction, politicians and journalists never speak of migrants, immigrants or illegal aliens, but only of “refugees” (Flüchtlinge) or “protection seekers” (Schutzsuchende).

As soon as someone without legitimate papers sets foot on German soil, he becomes, by definition, a “protection seeker”. According to the German statistics agency (Statistisches Bundesamt), for instance, there are 1.6 million asylum seekers currently in Germany. So far, so good. But the foreign ministry’s new campaign now raises a puzzling question: How can the idea that every newly-arriving migrant is an asylum seeker be made consistent with the new finding, according to which many are actually seeking jobs, housing or money?

Moreover, critics were quick to point out another contradiction. In 2014, the government’s own Agency for Migration and Refugees (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, BAMF) produced a 17-minute-long promotional video supposedly describing the arrival of a fictional refugee from Iraq: how he files an asylum request and is admitted to an refugee shelter. In the entire film, there was no mention of any obstacles or unpleasant situations. Instead, the fictional refugee encounters smiling officials who have seemingly have been waiting just for him — their only client — to show up. One of them even speaks Arabic. Also, the refugee shelter in the film is not an overcrowded hot-spot of violent crime, but a cozy place with just two other residents who happen to be friendly and smiling: “One of them also speaks my language. Arsalan has already been here for a few weeks and offers me his help.”

Even if all current 28 EU members, plus Norway and Switzerland, closed their borders to migrants, the Islamic population will continue to exponentiate…. Today, it is an increase of six million in seven years. And tomorrow?

What will happen in major European cities, where the Muslim communities are currently based? Will London, Marseille, Stockholm, Brussels, Amsterdam, Antwerp and Birmingham all have Muslim majorities?

Under the “medium” and “high” projections in Pew’s scenarios, how can Europe preserve all its most precious gifts — freedom of expression, separation of church and state, freedom of conscience, rule of law and equality between men and women?

One of the most debated arguments about Muslims in Europe is the “Eurabia” claim: that high birth rates and immigration will make Muslims the majority on the continent within a few decades. For years, most of the media and analysts dismissed the claim as alarmist and racist. “Dispelling the myth of Eurabia”, sniffed a major Newsweek cover.

Not many had the courage to sound an alarm. The great Arabist scholar, Bernard Lewis, sent out a warning more than a decade ago that Europe would turn Muslim by the end of this century, and dissolve into “part of the Arab West, the Maghreb”. The late scholar Fouad Ajami also cautioned that “Europe is host to a war between order and its enemies, fueled by demography”; and the Italian writer Oriana Fallaci imagined a continent with “the minarets in place of the bell-towers, with the burka in place of the mini-skirt”. Mark Steyn explained that “the future belongs to Islam” with an “enfeebled” West in a “semi Islamified Europe”.

Ten years later, since Europe opened its borders to a massive wave of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East, the demographers reviewed their assessments.

President Trump’s announcement Wednesday that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was both correct and prudent from America’s perspective. Much more remains to be done to relocate the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but this was a vital first step.

What is now critical is implementing Trump’s decision. Will the State Department actually carry out the new U.S. policy — which State’s bureaucracy strongly opposed — or will the entrenched opponents of moving the embassy subvert it quietly by inaction and obfuscation?

In 1948, the United States, under Harry Truman, was the first country to recognize the modern state of Israel upon its declaration of independence. Nonetheless, Truman, at the State Department’s urging, declined to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a mistake continued by his successors. Trump has now corrected this error: Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital since 1948, and the sooner the American flag flies over the American embassy there, the better.

The expected protests and violence from the usual suspects in the Middle East have already begun, and more can be expected. Fear of these protests has deterred prior administrations from moving the embassy to Jerusalem. But it is wrong for America to bend to such efforts to intimidate us. Congressional support will be overwhelming, as it should be; over 20 years ago, the House and the Senate legislated almost unanimously that the president should relocate our embassy to Jerusalem. Given the inevitable bureaucratic obstructionism, however, Congress must continue playing an important role — by constantly prodding the State Department and by providing prompt and adequate funding for building a first-class new embassy.